


Fandom Stocking Ficlets 2018

by isozyme



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Extremis, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Scrapple!!!!!, Someone Please Fix Director Stark, The Care and Keeping of Tony, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 12:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17487671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: Here are my fills for Fandom Stocking this year!  They all turned out to be Tony hurt/comfort, with varying levels of comfort from "absolutely not" to "wrap him in a literal blanket."





	1. If You're Never Sorry (You Can't Be Forgiven)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/gifts), [Kiyaar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/gifts), [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts), [runningondreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/runningondreams/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Director Stark jumps forward in time, ugly-cries

“You don’t look so good, buddy. Multiverse or future?”

Tony doesn’t think he’s ever looked in the mirror and seen someone so beaten. Other-Tony is physically healthier than he is — maybe he gets Extremis back in the future, or kept it in some other universe — but all the emotion is stripped out of his face, leaving him dead-eyed. Hollow. There’s no life in him.

“Earth-616, 2007,” Stark says. From the patches on his black and white uniform, he’s currently the Director of Shield.

“No, that can’t be right. This is Earth-616 in 2013, and I don’t remember being—“ Oh, shit. Of course he doesn’t have any memory of 2007. And worse -- this Tony doesn’t know.

“Steve’s alive,” Tony says.

For a second, Stark believes him.

Then he narrows his eyes and draws a gun, the gold Extremis undersuit already flowing up over his neck and hair. Toni jumps backward, hands in the air. “Who are you? What do you think you’re playing at?” Stark snaps.

Stark’s eyes flicker, trying to call the suit. Nothing comes. Tony hasn’t had Extremis-enabled armor around in at least six months.

“Friday, call Steve,” Tony says, as level and calm as he can with a gun trained on his head. “Private line, priority.”

“Are you a Skrull? LMD? I’m not in my own past, I can kill whoever I want without jeopardizing any timelines.”

Tony’s workshop computers throw up unhappy warning messages as Stark mentally crawls through them, hunting for an answer he doesn’t want to hear. Tony had forgotten how nice it was to be able to do that. 

Luckily, Steve picks up Tony's call; his face splashes up on the main screen, sleepy and worried. Tony supposes it is about four in the morning. What can he say, portal technology is touchy, and it doesn’t like being left unattended. The presence of Director Stark is evidence enough. Steve can handle it. This is a tense situation.

“We assembling?” Steve asks. “Or — hm. I see.“ Steve blinks, taking in the second Tony and the gun.

“Would you tell Mr. Twitchy over here not to shoot me?” Tony asks. “I’d appreciate it.”

“Stand down, Tony,” Steve says firmly. “Let’s talk this out.”

“This is a trick. You’re dead!”

“It’s not,” Tony says.

“I think I’d know if I was dead,” Steve deadpans. He’s always extra sarcastic when Tony wakes him up in the middle of the night, Tony thinks fondly.

Stark slowly drops the gun until the barrel is pointed at the floor. Tony breathes a sigh of relief and sits down heavily on a nearby stool.

Steve nods. “Good. Now, if someone could explain why there’s two of you, that would be helpful.”

Tony starts to compose a speech about temporal rift fluctuations that he doesn’t have any control over, which occasionally generate freak events that Tony also has no control over, which means this is not his fault, and probably he can fix it if he’s given a few hours — maybe days — less than a week, definitely.

Stark interrupts with a terrible sound, strangled and wordless, like the final cry of a wounded animal. He’s covered his face with both hands, but between his fingers Tony can see that his teeth are bared in a horrible rictus of grief. 

“I think I took your apparent death poorly.” Tony is painfully glad he doesn’t remember this.

“Hey Shellhead,” Steve says, using the gentle tone he only breaks out when he thinks Tony might be bleeding out in the armor. “I’m coming down there in a minute. Hold on for me, okay?”

Stark’s crying. He’s not bothering to wipe the tears away, just letting them fall, wetting his lips and the creases of his nostrils and his goatee. It’s awful to watch.

“And Tony,” Steve adds, “maybe you could give yourself a hug while I get downstairs? I think he needs it.”


	2. Breakfast for Dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve introduces Tony to good, proper breakfast food.

“Hey, Tony, look what Rhodey got me from the Mennonite market down in Philadelphia,” Steve says, holding out a square package wrapped in butcher paper.

Tony looks intensely dubious. He sniffs the air and ventures, “Some kind of food? Meatloaf?”

Rhodey’s mama makes a really fine meatloaf, which Steve’s gotten the occasion to taste now and again. Tony owes her a debt going a long way back, and the only way she’ll let him pay her back is by keeping her company sometimes.

“Nah, this is scrapple,” Steve says, and has to laugh at the poleaxed look on Tony’s face.

“Winghead, that had better be some fancy new type of Granny Smith in there. It it short for — I don’t know — scrub apple? Scry apple? Did you bring me a new, trendy hybrid fruit? Tell me it’s a miracle of genetic engineering and not —”

“Pork trimmings, corn flour, spices, lot of salt, pressed into a brick and cut in slices. I’m gonna pan-fry some tonight.”

“Gross, Steve. Gross.”

“It’s the honest man’s hot dog.”

“I don’t eat those either.”

Tony’s a little fussy about food when he has the choice. They’ve both been stuck in the Savage Land enough times to learn that in a pinch, anything that can get eaten will get eaten. Tony’s got a knack for generating fire out of nothing, and Steve can snatch a fish right out of a stream if he concentrates.

Steve is still sore from their most recent Savage Land visit. People shouldn’t turn into dinosaurs. Steve’s sick of it.

One time in the Savage Land Steve hauled a primordial, scaled thing as long as his arm out of a river. It had bitten his fingers while he washed off a scrape from the (inevitable, frustrating) crash into the jungle, so Steve grabbed it by the jaw and brought it, triumphant, back to Tony. That fish-ka-bob is one of Steve’s fonder memories, despite being stranded and swarmed by upsettingly large biting insects. He and Tony had burnt their fingers picking at the flaky flesh. The meat was dark and fatty, richer than any fish Steve had had before.

At home, in the mansion or the tower, however, Steve has to work harder to get Tony to indulge in proper food. Tony doesn’t have Steve’s muscle mass to keep up, but he’s tall and strong in the shoulders. Steve doesn’t like when he tries to live on coffee and snatches of bruschetta at gala events. It hollows him out.

So, Steve’s trying a low blow. Pennsylvania Dutch scrapple is a legend.

Tony disappears, off to a meeting organizing the New Avengers. He re-appears, not exactly coincidentally, right as Steve puts a slab of scrapple into a buttered cast-iron skillet. It sizzles and smells tantalizingly of pork fat.

The simple things, Steve thinks. That’s the point.

“That looks like particle board,” Tony says, hooking his chin over Steve’s shoulder. His jaw is sharp and just a little stubbly against Steve’s skin.

“You want some?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve watches Tony wrinkle his nose. “No.”

“Suit yourself,” Steve says. He cracks a couple eggs into a second pan, fixing them up simple with salt and pepper.

Tony wuffles a warm breath into Steve’s neck. He’s tired lately, beat down from two jobs that could each singly wear a man to the bone. Steve suspects the smell is getting to him, undermining his stubborn insistence that too much butter is bad for a man.

Steve puts another slice of scrapple in to fry, then pulls away to get some bread and apple sauce from the cabinet. Tony grumbles over the lost contact and pulls out his phone. He makes an appalled sound at his email, then taps out something terse. The tinny whoosh of the message sending sounds cold compared to the warm kitchen noises all around.

“Don’t you dare,” Tony warns, as Steve fetches down two plates. “I don’t eat beige food. If I’m going to put something in my body it had better be a color. I want my meals plated like they belong in the MOMA, Steve. Scrapple and eggs doesn’t belong in a PNC bank lobby, let alone a museum.”

“If you decide you don’t want it,” Steve says with a shrug, “I’ll eat yours.”

Tony glares.

Steve doesn’t do any fancy presentation. He puts a sprig of fresh dill on top of Tony’s eggs, just so he can have the moral high ground on Tony’s food-has-colors rule. The scrapple is crispy, the egg yolks are runny and the apple sauce is chunky and sweet. It’s just what Steve wants: good, honest food.

“Jesus, Steve, this is not good for me,” Tony swears, and takes a bite. Immediately he stares down at the plate like it’s grabbed him by the tie and shown him the face of God. The Mennonites know how to make scrapple.

“Yeah it is,” Steve says, putting one elbow on the table and smiling. “It’s got liver in it. Get your iron levels up.”

Tony laughs and throws his garnish at Steve. It lands in a smear of egg yolk, bright green on yellow.

Tony looks better than he has in three days — a little irritated, a little fond, eyes almost falling shut as he chews. Steve wants to kiss him, keep Tony occupied body and soul until all the weight of the world falls off of him.

And, Steve thinks, he promises, he will.


	3. Folk Remedies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony'd like Steve to know that orange juice won't get his robot finished any faster.

“I’m going to make a vaccine against rhinovirus,” Tony groused. “It can’t be that hard, people started making vaccines in the eighteen hundreds. How long do you think it’d take to get a PhD in virology? Six months?”

“Drink your orange juice,” Steve said.

Tony wrapped his garage blanket tighter around his shoulders. The concrete walls sucked the heat out of the place. His dedicated blanket for when his feet got cold in the workshop was heavy and woolen, an ancient olive-green army-surplus thing stained with grease and flecks of red lacquer.

“The Vitamin C thing is a myth. I don’t need juice, I need pre-made antibodies running through my blood ready to take this virus out before it colonizes my sinuses.”

“I wouldn’t know, Shellhead, I haven’t had a cold since the forties. Pretty sure the fluids are still good for you.”

Tony rubbed his nose. “I hate you.” He had deadlines; there was a bio-electronics conference in Singapore in five days. He wanted this prosthetic prototype to be able to divide egg yolks from the whites on stage. Right now it was very good at breaking eggshells and not much else. Eggy slime was spread all over the floor around Tony’s test area.

Can’t make an artificial limb without breaking a few eggs, Tony thought. He refused to present some hack job that could only stack blocks. He wasn’t an amateur. The accelerometers in the fingertips just needed a few more tweaks. Also, he needed another few dozen eggs.

“Your robot will still be here in the morning,” Steve coaxed.

“My robot is here now,” Tony whined.

Steve ran a hand through Tony’s hair. It was a little damp with sweat, in defiance of the chill air in the workshop. “If you come upstairs and drink something, I’ll work out all these knots in your shoulders.” Steve prodded Tony right in a tense muscle to demonstrate his point. Tony hissed, leaning into the pressure. God, he was sore. Leaning over the workbench for eight hours at a time didn’t encourage good posture. His upper back felt like it was made of concrete.

“I'll consider it,” Tony allowed.

Steve made a smug noise and kept rubbing at Tony’s shoulders. Tony tipped his head to one side, giving Steve access to a nasty knot right at the base of his neck, then sniffed as the new position made his nose run.

“You’re a mess, Tony,” Steve said fondly.

“I’m perfect in every way.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“But maybe I need a break,” Tony admitted.

“Thought so.”


	4. Human of the Year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony Stark is a futurist. He knows you can't go back.

Tony sees white spots flashing all along power lines, now. It’s ultraviolet light. With Extremis his eyes detect a wider spectrum.

Once, flying while woozy from blood loss (or maybe a concussion, the injuries bleed together these days), Tony tangled himself in power lines. It fried every one of his systems and left him with burns circling his skin everywhere the suit’s metal seams touched him. He’d looked like a character from Tron.

He’s safe from that ever happening again. Not only because of the strange sparking vision; the entire American electrical grid is in his head, and he could import more places on a whim if he ever wanted to.

Extremis feels like a cacophony, like seven orchestras playing at once, like holding a three dimensional projection of a Boeing 737 in his mind, peeling it apart into three hundred thousand pieces and then spinning them.

Finally, for the first time in his life, not one atom of Tony is bored.

He tries to explain what it’s like to Steve while they’re sitting in the break room of the helicarrier, waiting for Maria Hill to authorize their flight itinerary. For Steve, he devotes most of his processing power to the one conversation. In the back of his mind he keeps a running feed of every news mention of the SRA, but it’s barely a dull roar.

With this much focus, Tony can practically feel the crackle of the pacemaking nerves in Steve’s heart.

Instead of being interested, Steve looks horrified. “Are you even human anymore?”

“I’m human-plus,” Tony snaps. “Extremis didn’t take anything away. Look.”

Tony puts down his coffee and lets the undersuit run, molten and golden, over his palm. Steve runs two fingers over it, wincing at the texture.

“I think it took something,” Steve says. He stands to get another drink from the water cooler. The cone paper cup looks tiny and ridiculous in his hands. Tony can’t make himself look at Steve’s face; he’s feeling too much; he thinks it’s fury.

“You know,” Tony says, allowing his entire hand turn gold out of spite, just to make Steve flinch again, “I thought you’d be happy that I’ve made myself a little bit harder to kill. Or did it make you feel big and strong, protecting your man in a can? Soft, squishy Tony Stark: the regular human trying to hack it next to the real gifted heroes.”

“I’m glad you’re safer,” Steve growls. He moves to put down his empty cup, then remembers that it’s pointed at the bottom. He crushes it in his fist instead. “These cups are stupid.”

Tony takes a gulp of his coffee. It’s starting to go cold but not quite there yet; instead it’s almost exactly body temperature. Nothing-temperature. “It’s to keep people from leaving them everywhere. Not everyone is Mr. Morally Upstanding. Some people litter.”

Tony realizes, suddenly pleased, that he can make localized microwaves using just the undersuit. He wraps both hands around his coffee cup and heats it back to steaming. Steve looks on, expression stiff.

They’re quiet for a while, Tony enjoying his warm coffee, Steve visibly stewing.

“Tony,” Steve says eventually, surprisingly small. Tony forgot, even with petabytes of memory hosted locally and on offsite servers, that Steve always covers his fear with anger. “What’s happening to us?”

“Progress,” Tony says, beyond exhausted, so tired of Steve not getting it. “Nothing stops just because you want it to. Nothing goes backwards.”

“You could slow it down. You can make it stop.”

An alert pings at Tony from the news feed. Miriam Sharpe is giving an interview. The text stream classification program Tony’s assigned to monitoring Twitter informs him of a sharp increase in tweets including both words associated with negative emotions and the names of superheroes.

“No,” Tony says. “That’s what you don’t understand. I can’t. Nobody can.”


End file.
